


It is Right to Rebel

by PKI



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Original Trilogy, Star Wars Prequel Trilogy, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: Asymmetric Warfare, F/M, Family, Gen, Time Travel, not really a fix-it
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-09-13
Updated: 2021-01-08
Packaged: 2021-03-07 00:53:46
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 3
Words: 16,826
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26448115
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PKI/pseuds/PKI
Summary: Luke Skywalker finds himself thrust back in time, eight days before the fall of the Galactic Republic and the rise of the Empire. Having trained with his Master, Old Ben Kenobi, since the age of thirteen - Luke thinks he just might have a chance of saving the galaxy and his wayward father.He hadn't expected his father's former Padawan to make things more complicated than they already were.
Relationships: Anakin Skywalker & Ahsoka Tano, Anakin Skywalker & Luke Skywalker, CT-7567 | Rex & Ahsoka Tano, CT-7567 | Rex & Luke Skywalker, Luke Skywalker & Ahsoka Tano, Luke Skywalker & Yoda, Obi-Wan Kenobi & Anakin Skywalker, Obi-Wan Kenobi & Luke Skywalker, Padmé Amidala & Luke Skywalker, Padmé Amidala/Anakin Skywalker
Comments: 19
Kudos: 190





	1. Awakening

Luke immediately knew something was deeply wrong the moment he opened his eyes. 

He came out of sleep slowly, groggily and a bit painfully—it reminded him starkly of his sixteenth birthday. Force be damned, but that awful hangover from Mr. Darklighter’s Corellian brandy had been worth it to see Ben’s reaction. 

This time, though, he wasn’t waking up after his first night of adulthood—by Tatooine’s standards, anyway—and Ben wasn’t there to scold him and bring him a bucket for the vomiting. He was alone and cold, and his eyes would not cooperate: each time he tried to open them it felt like pulling Chandrilan chewing gum apart. 

The Force was even stranger—lighter and filled with such an incredible mass of life and activity that it made him more nauseous than he already was. 

_What happened?_ he thought, as he finally managed to pull his eyelids apart— though it took his trembling fingers to do so. _Where am I? And why is everything so fucking bright?_

For as long as Luke could remember, all the way back to the first time he had felt the Force in the kitchen of his aunt and uncle's old homestead, it had been dominated by a cold and ghastly shadow. He had been born into a galaxy controlled by the Sith, in which the light of the Jedi Order had long been extinguished. 

Now, though, it was overwhelmingly bright and active. Sure, he could still make out the familiar darkness at the edges of his senses, but it was far less significant. The only thing that could have made that happen was...but no—that was impossible.

Was the Emperor dead? Was Vader—his _father_ —gone as well? It couldn’t be. No one could face them and survive. Ben had stressed that grim fact half a hundred times, whenever Luke dreamt of defeating the Sith or, in his more vulnerable and naive moments, of redeeming his father. It was simply impossible.

But what, then? What had changed?

Luke groaned as his eyes adjusted to the low light of wherever he’d found himself. The surface he was lying on— _durasteel_ , he guessed—was cold and uncomfortable against his bare skin.

_Wait...am I naked?_

He shot up in a flash, bouncing from foot to foot and checking himself over with feverish hands. Luke found, to his horror, that he was, indeed, completely nude. 

His heart raced a kilometer a second and his headache returned at full force.

“Ben?” he croaked into the darkness. 

No one answered. He hadn’t felt Ben’s presence when he began to stir, but that wasn’t so strange: Ben often ventured out into the desert in the early morning for meditation. 

Now, though—with his vision clear and his mind fully alert—he understood that this was a fundamentally different situation: Ben was not with him; he was not on Tatooine; and judging by the chill in the air and the faintly burnt scent that tickled at his nose, he was also in space. 

_Where in the Force-forsaken, Sith infested universe am I?_

It was then that he noticed the door a few meters away, the harsh glow of artificial light fixtures leaking through at its edges. 

_A prison cell, maybe?_ He sucked in a harsh breath at the thought of Vader and his inquisitors. _Did they find us? Is Ben dead? Are they taking me to the Emperor?_

Despite the unnerving lightness of the Force—an obvious sign that he was not, in fact, being held by the inquisitors—he could not take the risk of ruling it out entirely. Dark Side wielders were cunning manipulators, after all. Perhaps they were only trying to lure him into a false sense of security before they attacked.

_Yes_ , he decided, _that’s got to be it_ . _Well, I’m Luke Skywalker—almost a Jedi Knight—I’m not going to fall for their tricks_.

He steeled himself with the thought of all his years of training with Ben and took a confident step forward. Luke immediately slipped on a loose object and nearly went tumbling back to the floor, but he managed to catch himself.

He breathed raggedly and clutched his racing heart as his eyes darted around to find the offending item. Luke was surprised, and overjoyed, when he realized that it was actually his lightsaber. 

He bent down and picked it up off the floor, relishing in the familiar weight of its chrome body in his hand. Its brilliant blue blade ignited without issue, and he raised it up as an improvised lamp. 

Luke realized, with a great deal of confusion, that he had actually woken up in a nearly empty maintenance closet. The walls of the room were plain durasteel that reflected the light of his saber in a dull prism. There was little else to be found besides himself: a few bottles of green cleaning fluid, a broken down protocol droid with rusted joints, and a wood-handled broom. 

_What the—_ he shook his head free of confusion— _this must be part of the illusion. I have to stay vigilant._

He crept towards the door, holding his lightsaber in a defensive posture as he neared the control panel, and flipped the switch to open it. 

Luke startled slightly as the closet was flooded with light, but he kept his wits about him and probed his surroundings with the Force. He was immediately greeted with thousands of lifeforms in his vicinity—including, to his dismay, three other Force sensitives.

_That’s not good,_ he thought. _I can take one inquisitor, maybe two—but three? Best to avoid them._

His heart sank even further when he stepped out into the hallway and realized that he’d found himself in the bowels of a full-blown Star Destroyer. Not one of the little transports nor even a Cruiser, but an actual _Star Destroyer_.

_Well, fuck, that’s_ really _not good._

“Hey, you!” a voice suddenly called out from behind him, accompanied by the rapid beat of heavy footfalls against the dark surface of the hallway’s durasteel floor panels. “Why are you out of uniform, trooper?”

Luke whipped around, lightsaber rising into a defensive position.

“Woah,” one of the stormtroopers said as the group came to a sudden halt about ten meters away. “He’s naked.”

The stormtrooper’s comrades seemed to be just as shocked, and Luke used the distraction to his advantage, taking stock of his enemies: there were three in total, all armed with a model of blaster that Luke had never seen stormtroopers carry before. Their armor was strange as well—it looked bulkier than normal and was accented with swathes of blue paint along the pauldrons and chest plate.

The stormtrooper in the middle— _their commander,_ Luke assumed—seemed to shake himself and stepped back cautiously, saying, “Sir, are you alright? I wasn’t aware that we had more Jedi on board. Do you need to be escorted to the medical-bay for treatment?” 

_‘More Jedi onboard’? Have they captured Ben too?_

“Sir?” the trooper said again, while one of the others began to cautiously reach for their wrist-mounted communicator. 

Luke knew that he could easily take the three of them, but he wasn’t so sure about the inevitable reinforcements. He decided in a fraction of a second as the trooper was about to activate his communicator. Luke threw out his hands and called upon the Force, sending the three troopers flying backwards through the air as they cried out in surprise. He turned tail and bolted down the hallway, ignoring the confused yelling that followed in his wake.

_I need to find Ben, or whoever those ‘other Jedi’ are,_ he decided. _Then I have to get the hell out of here_.

******** 

“The Council will decide what our course of action will be.”

It didn’t surprise Anakin one-bit that Obi-Wan deferred to the Council—even in this. Maybe he was right: everything Anakin had learned from the age of nine onward would certainly say so, but such thinking rankled him. He could not imagine himself saying the same thing if it were Padmé's death he was avenging.

And Obi-Wan _had_ loved Satine, Anakin knew that with absolute certainty. So, why did he not want vengeance? Why would he balk at the chance to burn everything Maul had built atop Satine’s ashes? It made no sense at all. To Anakin, it seemed entirely inhuman.

Bo-Katan clearly thought the same, judging by the contempt in her eyes and the sneer on her lips. She thought Obi-Wan weak, and Anakin couldn't truly blame her.

He glanced at Ahsoka for the ten-thousandth time since she’d emerged from the Mandalorian starship—he couldn’t help himself: she was older, more confident and self-assured. She’d grown up without him.

That thought was the only thing that could put a dent in his joy at seeing her again after so long. Well, that and the depressing atmosphere that had fallen over the Command Center like a thunderhead.

She caught him looking and smiled sadly as Bo-Katan clutched her helmet tightly and clenched her jaw, turning and whispering something to Ahsoka. Her smile fell and her eyes became distant and determined again. 

Anakin wanted desperately to bring that smile back, to convince Obi-Wan to let them help, but his chance to intervene was ruined by the sharp ping of his wrist-mounted communicator. 

“Skywalker here,” he said, bringing the device close to his face.

“General Skywalker, there’s a—er, well, a _situation_.” Rex’s voice was strained and suffused with a peculiar mixture of worry and baffled amusement. 

Anakin furrowed his brow and caught Obi-Wan’s eye.

“What is it, Rex?”

“Ah, that’s just it, General—I’m not sure what’s happening.” He faded in and out, as if he were running while he spoke. “You might want to listen to what I have to say discreetly. It’s, er, _sensitive_ information.”

Rex wasn’t using any of the code phrases that signaled classified information, and Anakin had no intention of leaving Ahsoka’s side so soon after getting her back.

“Just say it, Rex. I’m kind of in the middle of something.” He glanced warily at the increasingly impatient Mandalorians. He supposed that was fair enough—it _was_ poor manners to take a call in the middle of a meeting, after all.

“Well, uh…” Rex breathed loudly through the communicator, his tone filled with resignation. “There’s a young human man—teenager, I think—a stowaway. But, well, he’s got a lightsaber and judging by the way he’s using it, it looks like he’s had extensive training.” 

Everyone in the Command Center—not including the ultra-disciplined clones—stared at him, or, more accurately, his communicator. 

Obi-Wan stepped closer and spoke loud enough for Rex to hear on his end: “Do you mean to say we have a _Jedi_ stowaway, Captain Rex?”

“None of the boys recognized him, but he couldn’t be anything else, could he?”

“What color is his lightsaber?” Anakin asked, hoping that they weren’t dealing with yet another one of Dooku’s assassins.

Rex caught on to what he meant immediately, saying, “It’s blue, sir. I may not know much about the Force, General, but I don’t think an agent of Count Dooku would worry so much about not killing the people trying to stun him.”

“Indeed, captain,” Obi-Wan said, bowing shortly to Bo-Katan—who was still glaring at him despite the interruption. “I will join you momentarily. Where is our uninvited guest currently holed up?”

“We’ve cornered him in Hanger 7-b, General Kenobi, but I can’t promise that he’ll still be here when you arrive.” The echoing sound of stun-blasts rang metallically through the communicator and a clone cried out somewhere in the background. “He’s quite agile.”

“I’m sure I’ll cope, Captain.” Obi-Wan stopped beside Anakin on his way to the door, whispering, “I’ll deal with this, Anakin. I know you’re excited to see her.” 

Anakin nodded, and they clasped arms as they’d done a thousand times before.

“Thank you, Master,” Anakin said just as quietly.

Obi-Wan smiled sadly and bowed once more to the Mandalorian envoy before sweeping from the Command Center, his robes rustling as he went. 

“Oh,” Rex suddenly piped up, “one more thing. Almost forgot to mention it: he’s naked.”

Anakin blinked owlishly down at his glowing communicator.

“He’s what?”

“Naked, sir,” Rex answered, his voice flat. “Completely nude. Doesn’t have a single article of clothing.”

“Well, Obi-Wan already left,” he said, staring at the empty doorway and stifling his amusement. It wouldn’t be appropriate to act so crudely in front of a diplomatic envoy. Though, going off the glint in Ahsoka’s eyes, he wasn’t alone. 

“Should I warn him, sir?” Rex asked. 

“Nah,” Anakin said, grinning at the nearly invisible quirk to Ahsoka’s lips, “let it be a surprise.” 

********

Luke probably would have been embarrassed by his state of dress if not for the twenty stormtroopers intermittently rushing him and firing blue stun-blasts from behind supply crates. They weren’t particularly difficult to deflect, though their accuracy was surprising for stormtroopers. 

More pressing, however, were the human-wave attacks that came every few minutes. The first time it hadn’t been a problem—Luke simply sent them flying with the Force and focused on blocking the stun-blasts. After the fourth such attempt, however, he was starting to get tired. Soon enough he would be too exhausted to even think of touching the Force.

“Drop the lightsaber and surrender yourself,” the trooper, who was clearly an officer of some kind, commanded for the hundredth time. “You are trespassing on property of the Republic Navy.”

_Republic Navy? Ha! That’s rich._

“Do you think I’m gonna fall for that, _imp_?” he yelled back. 

The stormtrooper didn’t answer and ducked behind his cover when Luke redirected a stun-blast at his head.

“I am not trying to trick you, sir,” the officer replied from behind the crate. “My name is Captain Rex, I am the commanding clone officer of the 501st Legion—and _you_ are trespassing on the _Resolute_. Surrender and you will be treated in accordance with your rights as a sentient being.” 

Luke went cold all over, and he barely managed to block the next few shots as his mind reeled. 

_The 501st? Vader’s Fist? Oh, no._

His father had found him at last. Somehow—despite the near absolute secrecy of his existence—Darth Vader had found out about his long-lost son. 

Luke had been trained for this moment, worked to his absolute limit to be prepared for a confrontation with the Sith. Ben insisted that Luke was strong enough to fight them, and that someday—once his training was complete, and he bore the title ‘Knight of the Jedi Order’—he might just be able to win. 

But that day had yet to come. Luke was still only Ben’s Padawan, not even an adult according to the Empire. There was no way he could face Vader now and survive. That is, if his father even intended to kill him. He’d probably be dragged off to Mustafar to be tortured into falling to the Dark Side, like so many captured Jedi before him. 

Luke could not allow that to happen. Ben was out there somewhere, and he needed to rescue him before Vader could take his vengeance. He would do whatever it took to save his Master—the Jedi Code and his own safety be damned.

He waited for the next charge of unfortunate stormtroopers to come at him before making his move. Luke cast them back with yet another push, ignoring the obvious first signs of Force exhaustion and darted forward under the cover of the troopers’ cries and flying bodies. 

The bright blue blade of his lightsaber flashed through the air and left a trail of ozone as he beat back half a dozen stun-blasts. He was on the officer in a flash, hacking the trooper’s blaster in two with a slash and swinging down again for the killing blow. Luke didn’t want to do it, death felt galling when it echoed in the Force, but he saw no other way to get through the wall of imperials between him and finding Ben. He was too exhausted to use the Force anymore. 

Luke did not expect his blade to be blocked by another, identical beam of plasma. 

“I don’t believe we’ve met before,” the lightsaber’s wielder said. “Rex didn’t say anything about your choice of clothing or lack thereof.” 

Luke blinked up into the man’s deep-blue and startlingly familiar eyes. His beard was more well kempt and auburn rather than gray, though there were a few silver hairs at his temples. He looked much younger and more sprightly, but the weary set of his brow was the same as it had always been.

“Ben?” Luke choked in surprise, stumbling back as this younger version of his Master dislodged their locked blades. It was all he could do to block the man’s rapid, well-placed strikes. Perhaps if he were in top shape, he could contend with the man— but he was far too confused and tired to fight properly. 

He lasted a few more jarring clashes of lightsabers before a stun-blast struck him in the side of the head, and he tumbled to the ground, unconscious.

********

“They shouldn’t salute me anymore,” Ahsoka said, pushing down the swelling of emotion that came with each passing trooper, “not since I left the Order.”

“It doesn’t matter them—it’s a sign of respect,” Anakin answered, and the warmth in his voice only made it all more confusing and difficult to wade through. “They know what you went through for them, day after day, battle after battle.”

He crossed his arms in a way that was so fundamentally _Anakin_ that it made her heart ache. Being here, on _his_ flagship—where she’d fought and lived for nearly three years of her young life—was completely overwhelming.

“Loyalty means everything to the—” Anakin said, but was suddenly cut off by the loud thuds of dozens of boots on durasteel.

She knew every single clone that came streaming around the corner into the hallway—their commander best of all.

Captain Rex had changed very little since she’d seen him last. Other than a few new scuffs on his armor and some new pieces added on, he was the same as he had always been. 

The other clones’ helmets, though, were _very_ interesting. She only caught sight of it for a fleeting moment, but Ahsoka could not mistake the white pattern and orange paint as anything other than her likeness. 

Rex froze when he caught sight of them and swiftly waved for the others to remove their helmets. He glanced behind her and cringed at the put-out irritation in Anakin’s expression. 

“It was supposed to be a surprise,” he grumbled, waving Rex forward. “I thought we agreed that you would be in the hanger with the rest of your men _five minutes ago_.”

Rex stood at attention, his back perfectly straight and his head held high, and said: “I apologize, General. The situation with the stowaway took longer to deal with than I had thought it would.”

It was clear from his expression that Anakin had completely forgotten about Rex’s bizarre report. Why would he think about nonsense like that when he had his Padawan to catch up with?

“It’s fine, Rex,” Anakin said with a dismissive gesture. “You’re here now, so let’s get on with it before _something else_ happens.”

Rex hesitated for a moment, his expression pinched, and said, “General Kenobi requested that I aid him in interrogating the stowaway, sir.”

“If Anakin has need of you, Captain, then you may go with your General,” Obi-Wan said from behind Rex, cutting off whatever expletive was surely on the tip of Anakin’s tongue. “I’ll be perfectly fine on my own with this one.” His voice was strained and tinged with a deep worry that set Anakin and Ahsoka on edge. 

Ahsoka blinked owlishly at the entirely naked teenaged boy—no older than her—that Obi-Wan held in his arms. The boy’s eyes were shut tightly and his face carried the faintly pained expression that came with stunning. His hair was much longer than Ahsoka was used to seeing with Jedi of their age, though not quite so unruly as Anakin’s.

More perplexing than that, however, was the familiar lightsaber that rested on his stomach.

Anakin saw it as well and stepped towards them, asking, “Why do you have my lightsaber?”

Obi-Wan sighed and nodded meaningfully to Anakin’s hip, where his lightsaber clearly remained.

“It isn’t yours,” Obi-Wan said. “I had thought it was as well when I confiscated it, but this weapon is far older and more weathered than yours. Though, the resemblance is uncanny.” 

There was a double meaning to his words which was lost on no one: this mysterious, naked, lightsaber wielding stowaway looked very much like a slightly altered and shorter Anakin Skywalker. None of them had any clue as to what that might mean. 

“You’re certain you don’t require my aid anymore, General?” Rex asked, staring warily at the unconscious boy.

“I am, Captain,” Obi-Wan answered, hoisting his burden into a better position as he began to slip. “Now, if you will excuse me, I have a mystery to solve.” 

Ahsoka watched him go until he turned the next corner and disappeared. There was something intensely strange about that boy, and it wasn’t just the lightsaber and his passing resemblance to Anakin. His presence in the Force was expertly masked, even when unconscious—but the little that Ahsoka had felt from him made her entire body tingle.

It was a completely new sensation to her, and she did _not_ like it one bit. 

“You okay there, Snips?”

Ahsoka startled and looked away from the empty hallway. 

“What? Oh, yeah—I’m fine.” She didn’t think she sounded very convincing, but Anakin caught on to her discomfort.

“If you say so,” he said, and his eyes lit up as he motioned her towards the door in front of them. “Come on, I have a surprise for you.”

********

Obi-Wan could not shake the feeling that this was the strangest, most unnatural experience of his life. The moment he had peered into the boy’s eyes, just seconds before he would have left Rex without a head, something had shifted within him. He had thought it was the Force at first, but when he reached out to find what had changed there was nothing new. 

It was the boy himself—his light-blue eyes, wavy blond hair, and his stubborn frown—that had caused the rupture. He looked _so much_ like Anakin. The lightsaber that had fallen from his hand when he collapsed only reinforced Obi-Wan’s suspicions: something deep, powerful and terrifying was at work here.

Obi-Wan watched the boy with sharp eyes as he began to stir. The clones had restrained him with strong cables against an austere durasteel chair, he wouldn’t be going anywhere. It afforded Obi-Wan the perfect opportunity to stare.

Although there was much of Anakin in the boy, there was also something else—an unknown, nameless contributor to the young man’s genetic code. It made the mystery all the more worrisome.

At least he was far too old to be Anakin’s son, which gave Obi-Wan a modicum of relief. But, then, whose child was he? Another, previously unknown child of Shmi Skywalker? It was possible: slave children were known to be stripped from their mothers at birth, Anakin being a notable exception to the rule. 

But Shmi Skywalker hadn’t been Force sensitive. What were the odds that she would bear two Force-wielding children? They had to be exceedingly low. What, then, could the answer be? Obi-Wan had no idea, and it made his head throb. 

“B-Ben?” the boy mumbled as his eyelids fluttered and his breathing picked up.

Obi-Wan said nothing as the boy struggled back to awareness. He wasn’t sure what to make of the sudden terror that bloomed in the young man’s eyes when he registered his presence in the room. It surprised him greatly that the boy could keep that fear from leaking into the Force. Whoever had trained him had been exceedingly cautious. 

“I do not know who _Ben_ is, but I can assure you that I am not him.” He pulled out the chair on the opposite side of the plain durasteel table. “In the interest of following protocol, I will inform you of my identity and your rights as a detainee: I am Jedi Master Obi-Wan Kenobi, General of the 212th Attack Battalion. You are a prisoner of the Grand Army of the Republic and are currently being held on the Venator-Class Star Destroyer _Resolute_ —Jedi Knight Anakin Skywalker’s flagship. It is currently the fourteenth day of the fifth month, sixteen years after the Great ReSynchronization. As per the recently amended Codes of Military Police Procedures, you have no rights.”

The boy sunk deeper into his chair with each word, his eyes blown wide. For the first time since their aborted duel, Obi-Wan felt hints of emotion slip out from under the boy’s tightly held shields: he was utterly terrified.

“Now, my young friend, tell me,” he began as gently as he could manage, “what is your name?”

The boy stared at Obi-Wan for a long moment, his blue eyes darting over every feature of his face. Obi-Wan startled slightly and reinforced his shields when he felt the light tendrils of the boy’s presence press against his mind, searching for something. After a moment, the boy withdrew with a stuttering gasp.

“Ben?” he whispered in a barely audible voice.

“As I said before, I do not know—”

The boy half screamed in frustration and shook his head rapidly, pulling at the ends of his hair. He stilled suddenly and looked up to Obi-Wan with blazing eyes. 

“If this is a deception of the Sith, then it’s the most intricate in history.” The boy breathed raggedly and clenched his hands into fists. “But I can tell that it isn’t. I’m here and you’re real. This isn’t a lie. _Force_ , eight days before the purge.”

Obi-Wan didn’t know what any of that meant, but it sent a shot of terror through his heart.

The boy set his forehead on the cold durasteel of the table, taking three measured breaths, just as Jedi were taught to do from the age of five.

“My name is Luke Skywalker. I’m Jedi Master Obi-Wan Kenobi’s Padawan— _your_ Padawan—and I think I’m here to rescue you.”

Obi-Wan’s mouth fell open, and he exclaimed, “What in the Force are you talking about?”

“I’m Anakin Skywalker’s son and I’m pretty sure that I’m from the future.”

“How—what—”. Obi-Wan never finished the thought. His communicator flashed red and blared out the loudest alert Obi-Wan had ever heard from the device. It was a level one threat alarm: Coruscant was under attack.

When he activated the communicator, Cody didn’t bother to wait for his acknowledgment, saying, “General Grievous has engaged the Home Fleet above Coruscant and kidnapped the Supreme Chancellor, General Kenobi. We have been ordered to return with General Skywalker and the 501st immediately.”

Every thought of divining the truth from the clearly troubled boy left him immediately. There was work to be done and the war could very well be won or lost in the next few hours. He could deal with unstable prisoners later. 

“Have the bridge chart a course for the capital without delay, Cody. I will join you shortly.” He disabled the communicator and shot up from his chair, striding quickly to the doorway.

“No, wait!” the boy cried out from behind him. “You have to listen to me! There isn’t much time left to stop the Emperor.” 

Obi-Wan barely heard the boy’s desperate shouting as the door closed behind him, nor did he register the sharp spikes of frustration, rage and fear that spiraled out from the prison block. He had a Chancellor to save and a war to win, after all.

******** 

“ _Fucking, Force-forsaken, nerf-herding, sithspit!_ ” Luke mumbled to himself as he rocked his chair back and forth, pressing at different points along the cable to find a weak spot.

He needed a new plan. The very fabric of reality had changed around him, and he was somehow, inexplicably, seventeen years in the past. Luke had no idea how _that_ had happened, but it didn’t really matter now. He had to figure out how to stop the Emperor, save the Republic and the Jedi Order, and stop his father from falling—all in the span of eight days. Luke really didn’t think the odds were in his favor.

He didn’t know that much about the fall of the Republic, at least not from a galaxy-wide perspective. Luke knew a few, very specific details that Ben had let slip over the years: he had been born on the same day as the Empire, the Jedi Order had been annihilated shortly before that, and Ben had battled his father on Mustafar and left him grievously disfigured in the hours immediately following the opening salvo of the Great Purge.

The duel on Mustafar was definitely not something Ben had meant to tell him about. It all came tumbling out on Luke’s thirteenth birthday—the only time that Luke had ever seen Ben drink. That birthday was the first after Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru had died in the Great Bantha Flu Epidemic, and Old Ben Kenobi had come to collect him from the moisture farm. 

Ben always said that Luke had completely changed his life from that day onward—that he had restored his hope. Luke guessed that Ben’s stringent sobriety was a part of that change. 

Now he had been given the chance to set everything right, so that Obi-Wan Kenobi would never have to become Old Ben of the Jundland Wastes at all.

_I just need to get out of this Force-damned chair._

Luke groaned and let the chair settle on its legs again. That approach was clearly a bust. There was only one thing left to try.

Obi-Wan, in his haste to save an actual _Sith Lord_ , had left his father’s lightsaber behind in the receptacle near the locked door. It might have been a genuine oversight, but Luke thought it was more a case of underestimation. He was just a teenager, after all. How could he possibly use his lightsaber with his hands bound behind his back?

Well, Luke Skywalker was Darth Vader’s son—fantastical Force-feats came with the territory.

“Come on,” he whispered, his eyes closed tightly in concentration. 

The lightsaber rattled loudly in the box and sprang upwards a second later, hanging in the air over the table. Luke’s forehead was scrunched in deep lines and a few small drops of sweat slipped down his neck, into the folds of the blanket someone had wrapped him in. 

He closed his fist behind his back and the lightsaber ignited with a sharp _snap-hiss_. Luke jerked his wrist to one side, the glowing blade fell, and one terrifying moment later, he was free—the thick durasteel cables clattering to the floor around him. He snatched his lightsaber from the air as it fell and let out a tremendous sigh of relief. 

Now all he had to do was find a way off the _Resolute_ once it dropped out of hyperspace over Coruscant. Perhaps he could find his way to the Jedi Temple to warn the Order before it was too late. 

Luke stowed the lightsaber under his blanket and crept to the prison-cell door, pressing his ear to it’s cool durasteel to see if he could hear anything outside. That test yielded nothing and neither did his prodding in the Force—the way was clear.

He ignited his lightsaber once more and plunged the blue blade deep into the automatic door’s locking mechanism. It gave way with a high-pitched hiss and Luke slipped out into the dim hallway of the prison block. 

The blood-red glow of the floor panels reminded him starkly, and unsettlingly, of imperial architecture. It truly was the twilight of the Republic, even the lighting hailed the rise of a new galactic order.

He managed to navigate his way through three whole sections of the ship before he ran into any real trouble—the crew was in a mad scramble to jump to hyperspace and everyone else was gearing up for battle. His luck nearly ran out when he ducked into an auxiliary service passage to evade a squadron of rushing clones and collided with a silver-plated protocol droid.

“Oh, my goodness!” the droid exclaimed as it toppled backward and landed with a ringing clash of metal on metal. The protocol droid took one look at him from its place on the ground and immediately knew that he wasn’t supposed to be there. “You’re the prisoner from the hanger. An escapee! Guards, guards—I’ve found an escaped pris—”

Luke took its head clean off with a single slash of his lightsaber, but it was already too late. 

“Hey, who’s back there?” a clone yelled out from somewhere further down the hallway. 

“Sithspit,” Luke cursed as he slipped deeper into the service shaft, diving through the first opening he found, directly into the midst of a bustling hanger.

Panic gripped him suddenly, and he looked around in desperation for some way out of his predicament before one of the many troopers spotted him. By some miracle of the Force, there was a single unattended shuttle in the corner of the hanger.

He weaved his way through the vast room, employing subtle Force suggestions and moving objects around where needed to distract the already preoccupied clones. Luke ducked quickly behind a computer terminal when a group came too close for comfort.

“They gave you an entire division?” a female voice asked incredulously. “Just like that? They didn’t seem interested in helping Mandalore before.”

Luke peeked out just enough to get a glimpse of the people speaking. 

_What are Mandalorians doing on a Republic Navy ship?_ He had thought that Mandalore remained neutral throughout the Clone Wars. But, then again, the Empire had strong censors on information about the waning years of the Republic. 

“It isn’t under my command, but yes. We will have a full division of clones taken from the 501st Legion to support the siege.” 

The second speaker was a Togruta girl—who looked nearly of an age with Luke and, judging by the twin lightsabers at her waist, was probably a Jedi Knight.

“And they’ll be gone once the job is done?” the Mandalorian woman asked. “I won’t have to fight another war to get the Republic off my planet?”

“You have my word, Lady Kryze. Once Maul is in custody and Sundari is secure, the clone army will depart for Coruscant.” She sounded rather reluctant to be returning to the capital.

Luke couldn’t really blame her, considering what was about to happen at the Jedi Temple if he failed to stop it—though she couldn’t know about that, of course. 

After a tense moment, the Mandalorian woman sighed: “Good. My people can’t get rid of Maul alone.” The two stared at one another for a long moment before the Mandalorian nodded slowly and went off with her small retinue of beskar-armored followers.

The Togruta girl’s shoulders fell slightly, and she turned to go off in a different direction, but stopped suddenly. Her montraled head turned very slowly and Luke’s heart jumped into his throat. 

For a single, terrifying and exhilarating moment, he thought he’d been seen. He ducked behind the terminal again and clutched his lightsaber to his chest. 

“Are you alright, Commander Tano?” a clone asked from deeper in the hanger.

Luke could feel her gaze burning through the terminal and knew she hadn’t looked away—that some part of her knew that he was there—but she said nothing of it. 

“Yes, Rex,” she said quietly, taking a tentative step towards where he hid, but seeming to think better of it a second later. “Just pre-battle jitters, I guess. It’s been a while since I’ve done something like this.”

The clone said something in response, but Luke’s heart was beating too loudly in his chest for him to hear. After a bit, he reached out in the Force to check if the way was clear and nearly jumped out of his skin when he came into contact with another presence— _her presence_ —standing right where she’d been.

The girl gasped quietly at the contact and reached back tentatively, but Luke had already thrown up his strongest shields. Eventually, after the lights in the hanger had turned a dull red and the clones had begun loading themselves onto their transports, she gave up and walked briskly away. 

Finally, after a nerve racking few minutes, he made it to the shuttle and stuffed himself into the cramped, uncomfortable confines of a rear storage bay and settled in for his hopefully successful escape flight. 

Now all he had to do was save the galaxy from decades of Sith tyranny. How hard could that possibly be? 


	2. Descent

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Luke finds himself in a tricky situation.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is the first part of a chapter that ended up being absurdly long. I'm not finished with the second part and I have know Idea when it will be posted. Also, I cleaned up the first chapter a little bit and compressed the timeframe mentioned to eight days before the Jedi Purge. Thirteen just felt too long for what happens.

Luke was no stranger to laying in wait, crammed into the tight corners of a smuggler’s run-down starship. He’d done it with Ben at least a dozen times. 

There wasn’t much they could do for Bail Organa and his fledgling insurrection—their battle lay with the Sith, the Emperor and Vader, not the Empire as a whole—but Luke was adamant that they do _something._ Ben was a stubborn old hermit, but he’d never been able to resist Luke when he truly wanted something—he’d told him once that he looked far too much like his father to deny him.

The few times Luke managed to leave Tatooine were mostly for supply missions too complex for the average rebel—assignments that demanded a Jedi’s special skills. It was on those missions that he’d first experienced true combat, and felt the awful echoes of death in the Force. 

Those excursions had come to an abrupt end when he and Ben had crossed paths with adversaries of an entirely different nature: his father's inquisitors. It was the first time that Luke saw a Sith lightsaber, bleeding crimson and leaking its agony into the Force—but it wouldn’t be the last. 

But _this_ particular stowaway effort was quite different from Luke’s experience: he’d never hidden on an Imperial—or, in this case, _soon to be_ Imperial—troop transport. Luke wasn’t sure what to make of it. On the one hand, the engines were so loud that he probably didn’t have to worry about being overheard if he moved around too much. But, on the other, the cabinet was so cramped that there was no way he would be able to defend himself if one of the clones decided to come looking for one of the extra respirators stabbing into Luke’s back.

Then there was the real, difficult, pressing question of the endeavor: what would Luke do when he arrived on Coruscant? 

There was, of course, a distinct possibility of dying in a flaming ball of twisted durasteel before he came anywhere near the planet’s surface. He was hitching a ride into one of the largest naval battles since the Ruusan Reformation, after all. But Ben had told him to trust _only_ in the Force—and it had yet to fail him. Luke took it as a matter of simple faith that he would find his way to where he needed to be to save the galaxy. 

Once he was safely on solid ground, he could make his way with all haste for the Jedi Temple to plead his case before the Council. Now _that_ was a daunting prospect all on its own. 

Apart from Ben and Master Yoda, Luke didn’t know a single thing about the High Council or who sat on it. Would they hear him out? Why _would_ they? What reason could they have to not simply arrest him for trespassing? After all, not even Obi-Wan Kenobi had bothered to listen. 

Luke frowned deeply and cast his doubts to the Force, locking up his mind in the tight and orderly fashion he’d maintained since Ben had first agreed to train him. In a galaxy ruled by two of the most powerful Sith Lords to ever exist—one of them being his own father—it would be beyond foolish to allow his growing power to be recklessly broadcast into the galaxy. 

Luke’s exceptional shielding was the only reason he was still alive at all. Any Padawan of lesser skill would have been quickly found, identified and subdued when faced with an inquisitor twice their age. But, on that fateful day—when Luke had found himself separated from Ben after a terrifying high-speed escape from an Imperial data-center on Eriadu—his training had not abandoned him. He crept about and led the inquisitor deeper and deeper into a twisted maze of defunct pipe works until he could face his enemy on more favorable terrain.

That had been his first true lightsaber duel, and his first victory. Luke had found no reason to revel in the glory of his feat, however. Killing was all the more revolting when done in close quarters—in the split second when one’s opponent slips up and their lightsaber slips between the cracks in their foe’s armor to pierce flesh and bone. 

Luke had no taste for it, but that didn’t matter much. 

He was a war orphan whose only true inheritance was a destiny blighted by bloody conflict. Son of the fallen Chosen One, preordained to succeed where his father had so miserably failed. There was never any chance for him to be anything other than a warrior—a _killer_. 

The shuttle rattled and the unfortunate burnt-stench of space slowly faded as they slipped through the atmosphere. Luke was struck by sudden and tremendous confusion. How had they slipped through the battle over Coruscant without a single scratch? It simply wasn’t possible that he could have passed through such an orgy of death without feeling a single thing.

He was not spared for long. 

As the ship continued its rapid descent, Luke could just make out the shouted commands of a clone officer in the main compartment. He heard the rattling and shuffling of the troopers making a final check of their equipment, and he felt the explosion of the first anti-air ordinance like a punch to the gut.

The entire transport jerked and rattled as the pilots dipped into desperate maneuvers to evade the rapid and, if the sound was any indication, increasingly accurate enemy fire.

That too was disconcerting. If they had managed to pass through Coruscant’s atmosphere, then who was shooting at them from the planet’s surface? Why would the Grand Army of the Republic fire on its own men?

More and more, Luke came to realize—with an awful sinking in his gut—that he’d managed to hitchhike to the wrong planet. There could be no other explanation. He groaned in tired frustration and banged his head against the cabinet’s door. The fate of the galaxy— _his family_ —was at stake, and he was already failing. 

_I can still salvage this,_ he thought frantically. _I just need to find out where I am, steal myself a ship, and set a course for Coruscant. There are still seven days left at the least._

He had only just begun to regather his wits when the surrounding air erupted with searing heat and a deafening shock. Luke curled in on himself as tightly as possible to avoid touching the sides of the cabinet, hot enough now to burn his skin. 

It wasn’t difficult to figure out what had happened: the enemy had hit their mark. 

The shuttle lurched and twisted, falling into a rapid and sickening spiral as it pitched downwards. Bile rose in his throat and all of his base instincts cried out at once in a cacophony of blinding panic.

But Luke was a Jedi Padawan, he’d been on death’s doorstep before, and he knew well how to handle himself. He forced his natural terror into the back of his mind and locked it up in the tightest mental binds he could manage—Luke could deal with _that_ later. Now, his sole purpose was survival. After all, he couldn’t save the galaxy if he was dead. 

Foregoing all former worries of being caught—it didn’t matter much when the ship was breaking apart—Luke tried to unlatch the cabinet. It didn’t budge; the locking mechanism had melted and fused in the initial explosion. 

Luke clenched his teeth and curled tightly before springing forth with all of his energy and directing a tremendous Force-wave outwards as his foot contacted the searing durasteel. The door came dislodged with a terrible screech and crashed into the opposite shuttle-wall. 

Luke tumbled out and landed on agile feet. The adrenaline coursing through his body dulled his senses to the cut of shrapnel on his legs and the blistered burns along his arms. 

He brought his lightsaber up swiftly, but there was no one waiting to stop him. His stomach roiled, and he clenched his teeth at the wretched sight: five clones, lying still on the blackened floor, viscous blood pooling around the heap. Their armor was melted in places and white bone poked through at sickening angles. 

Luke forced himself to ignore the hot, slick feel of blood on his hands as he bent down and pulled off one of the dead clone’s jetpacks. He could probably make it without one, but he had never had much of a reason to practice high altitude jumps.

It was unfortunate that the sight of blood still affected him so deeply. Despite the incredible violence and death he had witnessed and perpetrated in his young life, Luke had never quite gotten used to it. Even the slavers—despite his unrepentant hatred for them—were unwitting recipients of his empathy in death.

The shuttle jerked violently and Luke stumbled over to the half-opened side panel that the other clones had used to escape. He felt a pang of remorse that he could not say a prayer for the dead, but there was no time for a Jedi’s eccentricity here.

He squinted against the harsh wind as he leaned out of the doorway and did his best not to inhale too much smoke. Luke breathed a short sigh of relief: the shuttle was still at least a thousand meters above the ground, but it was losing altitude rapidly.

The jetpack didn’t quite fit him, and he worried that it would fly from his shoulders the moment he made his jump, but there wasn’t anything he could do about that now. His hands were trembling too violently to manage the controls and the adrenaline that had fueled him to that point was bleeding away, allowing the truth of his injuries to assert itself more and more with each passing moment. There was no time left for caution.

He coughed dryly as he glanced back to the grim mass of clones one last time and steadied himself in the Force as best he could. With one small step and a tremendous Force-powered leap, Luke dove through the narrow opening and into the smoke-filled air.

********

“We can’t sustain a long siege.” Bo-Katan’s voice was as level and calm as it always seemed to be. 

Ahsoka marveled at that: after a dicey landing and a hard fought push deep into the heart of Sundari, she sounded as though it had all been light work. Then again, she was Mandalorian.

“I’ll head to the throne room and deal with Almec. You _must_ find Maul.” 

She and her comrades were gone before anything else could be said, though Ahsoka had very little to add. Her purpose on Mandalore was simple: find the renegade Sith Lord Maul and return with him to Coruscant to face the justice of the Galactic Republic. 

It was her ticket back into the Jedi Order, the place where she had grown up—her _home_. Or, rather, it had been that way before. Ahsoka wasn’t so sure the Temple could go back to what it had been, even less so that she could ever be the Jedi the Order expected her to be. 

She didn’t rightly know if she wanted to go back. Her trust had been smashed and discarded. The Council didn’t even have the decency to admit that they had wronged her—not truly.

There was one thing Ahsoka was certain of: she had missed the GAR. It was disquieting in a way; so much of her time as a Padawan was spent in the mire of brutal, bloody combat. Ahsoka had watched countless men—many of them close friends—fall in battle. Yet somehow she’d missed it with all her heart.

She simply hoped that it was seeing her friends again that buoyed her most, and not some perverse thrill for death baked into her from adolescence onward.

Far below the edge of her makeshift observation deck, she could make out the retreating flashes of blaster fire as the clones swept the last of Maul’s forces from the main arteries of Sundari. 

The initial incursion had been harrowing, but everything after was coming along swimmingly. It made Ahsoka nervous—invasions never went _this_ well. The Republic taskforce wasn’t so overwhelming that it could sweep aside a host of determined, beskar-clad Mandalorians so easily. 

She huffed an unsteady sigh and pressed her doubts into the Force; the only way to prevent catastrophe was to outmaneuver Maul, and she could only do that if she kept herself in the present. 

“Rex,” she called out and turned her back to the city and its brilliant, glittering towers, now marred by smoke and ash. “I want you to support Ursa at the—”

She stopped when she saw the Captain huddled closely with two other troopers, conversing in hushed tones. He looked up when he heard her and sent the others off with a few sharp orders.

“Is something wrong, Captain?” Ahsoka asked and stepped closer. She couldn’t see his face behind the helmet, but she had learned long ago how to judge a clone’s body language: something had unnerved him.

“There have been some strange reports trickling in from the edge of the battle space,” he said, his voice tight and aggravated. “Troopers who managed to bail out of their downed shuttle before it hit the surface said they had a hostile encounter with a lightsaber wielding boy.”

Her white-marked brow rose to the base of her montrals and she asked a properly bizarre question for the circumstances: “Was he naked?”

Rex let out a long-suffering sigh and his shoulders fell a bit when he answered, “Yes, sir. The boys who found him said he was trying to stab a wounded pilot through the canopy of his shuttle near the western edge of the dome.”

“How?” she asked in true bafflement. “How did he break out of a detention block in the heart of a Star Destroyer? Obi-Wan wouldn’t have just left the door open, and there were thousands of clones he would have had to sneak past.”

“I have no idea, commander. But he’s ended up here, and we’ll have to track him down alongside Maul. The Jedi won’t let a rogue apprentice wander around the galaxy attacking troopers.” Rex didn’t seem enthused by the idea, and Ashoka couldn’t blame him.

“Dispatch a squadron to comb the area near where he was last sighted,” she said and did her best to push the unsettling matter aside. “We can’t spare more troops than that for him and Maul is a far greater threat. Tell them to bring him in unharmed if at all possible.”

Rex nodded, or as close to a nod as he could manage with his scuffed helmet on, and started fiddling with his communicator to find the right frequency.

“I don’t think that will be much of a problem, commander.” 

“Oh?” she asked in mild confusion—her thoughts already turning back to the overbearing prospect of facing down Maul.

“Well, he didn’t actually kill any troopers when we chased him through the _Resolute_.” He found the right channel and his communicator crackled harshly to life, but he looked away from it for a moment. “The only time it seemed like he was going to was when we had him cornered, and he tried to hack my head off before General Kenobi stopped him.”

“Attempted decapitation isn’t exactly a point in his favor,” she said absently. 

“Maybe so,” he conceded. “But the pilot he was stabbing at said the strangest thing when the brothers pulled him out—he said the boy was trying to _save_ him, and that he burned his arm badly doing it.”

Now _that_ —Ahsoka could readily admit—was very interesting.

******** 

Her first child died only moments after birth. She had been such a small, fragile thing—almost dangerously light. But she didn’t really remember that part, those few moments of happiness before the child’s heart gave out, and it was over. They hadn’t even decided on a name yet, and she was cremated without one.

Perhaps it was better that way, made it easier to move on without any holos lying about to remind her of happier times. She couldn’t say what Orro had felt; the two did not speak for some time, and he left Mandalore and her behind soon after. They hadn’t been wed, and she chastised herself for feeling betrayed—he was not bound to her.

When her third child died—a strong young boy of thirteen, this time born to a true family—it had been anything but natural. Hakku had been with his classmates, touring one of Duchess Satine’s newly erected supply depots, when an errant missile launched from the back of a Death Watch fighter had turned his flesh and bones to ash in the blink of an eye.

That time there was nothing left to cremate—but there _were_ holos. Dozens of albums and files spread throughout their computers made it impossible to escape his face: pictures from when he took his first steps, stumbling down the hallway connecting his room to his older brother’s; a photo from less than a week previous—the first hint of peach-fuzz barely visible on his upper lip. 

His father was no stoic, she had seen him weep hundreds of times, but the noises that Taenn made that day were entirely different. He sounded like a dying animal limping away to expire in peace.

She didn’t cry once. It was awful, inhuman and made her a terrible mother—but she simply could not manage to shed a tear. There were no more left, not after her beautiful firstborn had come silently into the world and left without even a wail. She was a husk of a woman, hollowed out and made emotionless. 

Her eldest, only a year out from graduating from the Royal Academy, took her silence the worst. When word had reached the Academy, Torr wasted no time in hurrying home to be with his family and see his brother off. But when he had come to her—not as the man he so often pretended to be, but as the child he still was—she had not been able to comfort him.

He had not returned home since, not even in the convulsions of violence that rocked Mandalore after Duchess Satine’s death.

Now it was happening all over again: the Galactic Republic had brought its war to Mandalore at last. For the first time since Hakku had been stolen from her, she was seized by deep and real emotion— _fear_.

Her fourth and final child, a precious little girl named Sirna, had always been curious. She liked to roam the small garden at the heart of their living complex, often playing in the dirt with the children of other families. It was not uncommon for Sirna to waddle back inside in the waning hours of daylight with brown-crusted fingernails and fresh bruises all over, her wispy silver hair stained with mud. But she was _never_ allowed to venture beyond the safety of the complex, and she didn’t—not until that day.

She was scrolling through the holonet and looking for nothing in particular when the first rumbles began far off on the other side of the city. A few years ago, she would have thought it was overly noisy construction—but times had changed; she knew the sound of blaster fire. But this wasn’t the sharp-shriek of a rifle or pistol, it was the dull roar of the tremendous repeating laser cannons mounted along the edges of Sundari’s black dome.

There were no shelters to flee to—the Duchess had only just ordered their construction before her death, and they had never been finished—and she knew it was foolish to believe that their durasteel roof would hold against an explosion. All she could do was gather her little girl and pray to the Jedi’s Force or whatever gods existed that her husband and wayward son would be safe.

When she made her way from their mid-level dwelling, down the winding staircase and out into the garden, she found a group of her daughter’s friends—all being collected and herded indoors by their parents—but there was no sign of Sirna. 

Even more pressing panic gripped her, and she dashed forward, seizing a man she faintly recognized as a neighbor by the wrist and pulling him backwards with a hard tug. 

“Hey, what are you—”

She didn’t give him time to finish his objection, “Have you seen my daughter? Have you seen Sirna Mylluh? She’s six years old, just about as tall as my hip.”

“I don’t know where your kid is, Mylluh,” he said in a rasping voice, shot through with terror. “I’d help you find her if there wasn’t fire falling out of the sky, but I have my family to look after.” He tore his hand from her grip and ushered two young children into the shelter of the complex without another word.

Her hands were trembling violently, and she couldn’t quite bring enough air into her lungs with each breath. She felt something wet on her cheeks and only faintly recognized that it was her own tears.

“I know where Sirna is, Mrs. Mylluh,” a small voice piped up from her knees. 

She looked down to find a boy of eight or so, his black hair in wild tufts and his hands slick with mud. His bright-green eyes were blown wide, and he looked about with fascination as parents darted around to find their children, not understanding what could possibly be so urgent.

She fell to her knees in the dirt in front of him and grabbed him by the shoulders so that his focus was on her alone.

“Where did you see Sirna go?” she asked in a high, pinched voice.

“Um...she went outside a while ago.” That was virtually meaningless: there were six different entryways to the complex, all of them accessible from the gardens.

She shook the boy harshly and knew she would regret doing it later, but there was no time for vague directions. 

“Where exactly did you see her go? Which door did she leave through? Can you point to it for me?” she asked rapidly.

The boy looked dazed and upset, but he answered quickly and pointed to the eastern gate, “Sirna went out that way.” 

She dropped her hands from the boy without a second thought and paid no mind to the woman who gathered him up and glared daggers into her back, hurrying out through the eastern gate. 

It gave way with a sharp screech that spoke clearly of a need for maintenance, and she slipped out onto the walkway of their normally quiet residential district. Now, it was anything but peaceful: panicked people of a thousand different species hurried back and forth and the air was scented with the tang of melting transparisteel.

“Sirna!” she yelled helplessly into the tremendous roar of stampeding crowds and the far off rumble of battle, drawing closer with each passing minute. “Sirna Mylluh!” 

She grew more desperate and frantic as time dragged on interminably. Finally, after what was likely a few minutes, but which felt to her like hours, she pushed her way through the pressing throng and emerged into an intersection of pathways no more than a hundred meters from their home. 

In the center of the plaza was a fountain. Once pristine and well maintained, it had fallen victim to wartime austerity and had not run in years. Its white stone was blackened by mold and its features were weathered to nothing. Normally, she would not even notice it. But now she did, for huddled beneath the protruding lip of the fountain's round basin was her trembling and terrified daughter.

“Sirna!” she called out with far greater strength than before, pushing through the crowd violently. 

Sirna looked up at the sound of her voice and her little eyes grew wide with relief. She stumbled onto unbalanced feet, tripping over herself in her haste to hide in the comfort of her mother’s arms—but she never made it.

The whistling began on her second step and at the moment when her little foot hit the grown on the fifth, the air folded in on itself. A wave of heat, light and pressure washed over the plaza and the girl disappeared into a plume of smoke and fire.

Her mother’s eyes were blinded for a moment by the intensity of the flash, but she made out clearly the silhouette of her small daughter against the flames. The woman’s heart fell down into her gut and bile rose in her throat, a silent scream on her lips. 

But something strange had happened at the moment that the rocket—a new model fresh off the assembly lines at Kuat Industries and mounted on every Republic LAAT—struck the plaza: a form, no more than a shadow and moving almost too quickly for the human eye to follow, swept passed the fountain and beyond the edge of the blast. In its wake it left a thin trail of red blood, leaking slowly from half a dozen wounds. 

“ _Buir!_ ” a high, shrill voice screamed so close to her ear that she thought she had finally lost her mind. When her head snapped to the call, however, the mother found that she was not mad: her daughter was right beside her, staring up at her with soot-stained cheeks, held tightly by a pair of human arms. 

One was burned badly, the skin peeling and blistered, while the other was slashed in a few spots and covered in a thin sheen of blood. Connected to the mangled arms, she was surprised to find, was a teenage boy around her son’s age. 

She had Sirna in her arms in a flash, pressing her little brow to her trembling chest and sobbing out her relief.

“Thank you,” she whispered harshly to the boy. 

He said nothing in return and when she blinked away her tears she found that he had slumped backwards to lie still on the blackened ground, his chest rising and falling in harsh, worrying breaths. A meter away from his outstretched palm, shining brightly against the smoke and ash of the plaza, was a chrome cylinder.

******** 

The sand gathered in thick clumps of gray and pulled on his ankles like a textile loom, sucking him down and spitting him back up in cycles. Around him and curling over his head in jagged fangs, craggy walls of red stone jutted prominently into the clear night sky. Their edges barely blocked the moons from view, but their soft light rebounded off the walls and filled the ravine with a comforting glow. 

Luke knew this place well; he had spent most of his adolescent years in and around these rocks, going back and forth between Ben’s hut and the market in Anchorhead. Sometimes Ben would conduct his training among the winding paths and gulfs, leaping back and forth over Luke’s head and sending down obstacles to trip him up. 

Despite its familiarity, Luke could not say for the life of him how he had ended up in the Jundland Wastes—nor what he was supposed to be doing there. In fact, Luke couldn’t recall much of anything. 

His head felt fuzzy and light. When he groped around at his hip he was surprised to find that his lightsaber was not there. He was even more shocked that he didn’t feel worried about its absence.

He rubbed his forehead tiredly with a rough hand, calloused from countless hours of lightsaber drills and work on moisture vaporators. His fingers tensed when they reached his scalp and he ran his hand through his smooth, close cut hair. That was peculiar: it was far shorter than he liked to keep it, much as it had been when his Master first agreed to train him.

More perplexing still was the thin, tightly wound braid that hung loosely on his shoulder. It was a Padawan braid, of the sort that Luke would have worn if he had been raised in the Jedi Temple—but which was far too dangerous to display under Imperial rule. 

His clothes were strange as well. Flowing robes of an unassuming teal hue were draped over his arms and bundled up in a dark brown travelling cloak. It was as if he were a younger, blonde Ben Kenobi. Luke had never worn these kinds of robes before, but he knew well what they were: the common wear of the Jedi Order in the days of the Galactic Republic—a sort of unofficial uniform.

Whatever opaque reason he had come here, Luke did so as a Jedi Padawan. Perhaps Obi-Wan had decided that he was finally prepared to face the Trials of Knighthood. This could all be an elaborate scheme to confuse him and make his task all the more difficult. 

But it didn’t feel that way. All around him the Force flowed in gentle streams of comforting light. It was freer and more jubilant than Luke had ever felt before— unburden by the pall of the Sith. It bound him and up and enticed him to trudge forward with gentle prodding.

Obi-Wan always told him to trust in the Force, so Luke made no attempt to resist.

He wound his way through the labyrinth of high walls and slipped deeper and deeper into the shadowed paths of the Wastes. Luke knew that Tuskens often made camp beneath the shelter of the walls, but that did not worry him—it didn’t seem like anything could.

Even when he turned a corner and came face to face with a Tusken hut, he did not feel afraid. The Force flowed as easily as before, and it felt as if something were reaching out to him—calling him onward. Luke obeyed without question and bent low, slipping beneath the Bantha-hide door flap.

Inside, surrounded by the flickering light of small oil-candles and sitting on her knees, was a woman. She was both strangely beautiful and familiar: her face was lined with age and laughter, but pain as well. 

She smiled at him sadly and Luke experienced a moment of realization somewhere in the back of his mind: he knew this woman, although her face was that of a stranger. Luke had sat beside her grave when he was a little boy who did not wholly understand death. He read her the stories that Aunt Beru found for him sometimes when she ventured off to the denser markets in Mos Eisley. 

This was Shmi Skywalker—his grandmother.

“Hello,” he spoke, but it sounded as if he were deep underwater. 

She cocked her head as if she could not understand him, but the smile never left her face. His grandmother held out her hands, and he came to her swiftly, though his every movement felt sluggish and delayed. She grasped his wrists and turned his hands over to trace his palms with bony fingers. 

She followed the line of his brow with wide, dazzled brown eyes, and caressed his cheek so tenderly that Luke felt the sudden and profound urge to weep. His grandmother saw it in his eyes and her smile grew fond and sad all at once.

“Ani,” she whispered, though no sound came forth. “Ani’s little boy.” 

Now he could not stop the tears that came, hot upon the tender skin of his cheeks. She wiped them away with gentle fingers and pulled him down to press her lips to his brow with a fierce sort of warmth. 

When she pulled away, her eyes wide and loving, she whispered soundlessly: “Go.” 

Perhaps he would have felt a flash of hurt in any other circumstance, but the Force was flowing through him like clear water and his heart was heavy with love and grief for something he had never had. 

He turned from her to peer back the way he came, where the hut’s flap swayed calmly in a desert breeze, and when he looked back, she was gone, and he was no longer in the Jundland Wastes at all.

He was taller and stronger now, built like a warrior well-used to battle. His heart, though, was still pressed down upon by mighty cables of old mourning.

Luke was not alone. He found himself in a large circular room, ringed on all sides by transparisteel that revealed a brilliant skyline of glittering towers and fading daylight. There were beings of different species all around him, their faces heavy with regret and shame—some more than others.

Ben was beside him, but it was the strange, younger version who had defeated Luke in the hanger of the _Resolute_. His entire being appeared to be weighed down by weariness and grief.

Luke suddenly felt a weight settle in his palm, which he had not realized contained a string of finely crafted beads. The weight was a small, orange hand— covered to the knuckles by dark fabric. It closed his fist around the string with gentle, caring strength. He felt an awful despair settle over his rapidly beating heart that he did not wholly understand and did not believe to truly be his own.

Luke looked up to the being’s face and found that he knew it, though only barely. It was the Togruta girl he had felt in the Force while stowing away on the shuttle.

Her eyes were wide, deep, and sorrowful.

He was struck by the urge to reach out, to comfort her and ease the swelling tide of pain he felt stirring around them. It was a strange impulse, for the two had never exchanged a word; had never truly even met.

But in the Force they were bound up by a million glittering threads, branching out and leading back to every being that had ever drawn breath. Luke knew suddenly that this was a memory, though not his own. He was seeing and feeling through some other space in the Force.

When he came back to himself and the Force calmed to a thrum, he was different again. He had been reduced back to his own being: again of a height familiar to him—his hair slightly longer than proper. 

But the Togruta girl’s warm hand remained clasped around his own, though the beads had disappeared. 

When again he looked to her, she appeared as she had on the _Resolute_ : older than before, taller and more confident. Her eyes were no longer sad, but were instead filled with a warmth and brightness that made his heart leap and his stomach clench. There was something else there as well, some sentiment that he could not identify, but which settled upon him like a veil of light.

She spoke soft words in a tongue that he did not understand, the sound coming clear and true unlike before. He did not know the meaning of what she spoke in his conscious mind, but a deeper part of him seemed to grasp it, and he was filled with a sort of jubilation that he had never felt. 

He did not notice when the room and its brilliant transparisteel walls faded from view. Luke was enraptured by her and fell forward willingly when at last his head bubbled over with static and light, and he was washed away into the Force. 


	3. Beskar Hospice

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Luke finds himself in the care of a Mandalorian family.

Taenn Mylluh did not know what to make of the boy who lay quietly upon his dead son’s bed. He seemed thoroughly normal: of average height; light-blonde hair scraggly and a bit too long; hints of wispy facial hair along his jaw, still slightly rounded by the remnants of childhood fat. Other than his awful burns and lacerations—now hidden beneath white bandages and the few bacta patches he had managed to scrounge from the Mylluh’s neighbors—there was nothing strange or intriguing about him.

Yet, somehow, he had saved Taenn’s daughter. The story that Thima told him when he had finally managed to fight his way home through the confused and terrified city simply was not possible. This teenage boy could not have pulled Sirna from the heart of an explosion in the blink of an eye; no human could do something like that.

However he had managed it, Taenn was simply grateful that the boy had been in the right place at the right time. Of course, if the Grand Army of the Republic had not seen fit to invade their planet Sirna would not have needed saving. It was just another frightful episode in a process that felt more and more like the collapse of the Republic. 

There had already been at least two coups in the past year: the first that had ousted Duchess Satine and the second one that killed her. Nobody seemed to know who was responsible for what anymore. Pre Vizsla made a rousing speech from the palace and a few days later he was dead. Was the Prime Minister back in power? Hadn’t he been arrested for poisoning children? There were no answers, and the people who went looking for them never seemed to last long.

And now, entirely out of the blue, a Republic army of Clone Troopers had bombarded and occupied the city. It was sheer madness, and it set Taenn at his wit’s end. They had already lost one of their children to war, he didn’t think he could endure another.

When Taenn emerged from the improvised medbay after tending to the boy’s bandages for the second time that night, he found his wife at their kitchenette’s small table, clutching her holopad in a white knuckled grip. Her pale-green eyes darted across the over-bright image, dark hair falling over her face in wispy tufts. She looked like an absolute wreck. He didn’t imagine he looked much better.

“She’s asleep?” he asked quietly, rummaging through their nearly empty liquor cabinet to find the good Corellian bourbon.

“I don’t know how she could after today,” Thima said in a rasping voice, raw from weeping. “I certainly won’t. Not until Torr answers me.”

He found the heavy bottle wedged all the way in the back of the cabinet and poured them both a healthy glass. 

The Royal Academy was not responding to any communications and the holonet signal was at least partially jammed; they had heard nothing from their eldest son since the first Republic missile burst over Sundari’s dome. 

“He’ll call,” Taenn said, though his tone was flat and airy. “He’ll call.”

Thima finally looked up from the datapad when he sat beside her. Her eyes were bloodshot and her brow was drawn down, exposing deep lines across her forehead. She looked thoroughly exhausted.

“I’m sure he will,” she whispered and tried to summon a weak smile. “How’s the kid?”

Taenn sighed and took a long drag from his glass. “Seems okay. He started shifting while I was changing the bandage on that nasty thigh wound. I think he was having some kind of fever dream.”

“Did he say anything?” she asked, setting aside the datapad and taking her tumbler in hand. “Maybe his name?” 

“Nothing,” he said with an apologetic frown. “He mumbled a bit, but it wasn’t anything I could make out. You can ask him if he wakes up.” 

“When,” she said sharply, and he blinked at the iron in her voice. “ _When_ he wakes up we’ll thank him for saving our daughter.”

“Thima,” he started in the most gently placating tone he could muster, “he’s in pretty bad shape. I’ve never seen anything like those burns and the amount of blood he lost—”

“He’s going to wake up, Taenn. That boy has already done impossible, miraculous things.” She shed the terrible weight of the moment as she spoke and her face became illuminated by a queer certainty. “I don’t know what it is about him, but that boy is _different_ , Taenn. Sirna should have been vaporized by that bomb, but instead she’s asleep just down the hall. _He_ did that, Taenn. That boy plucked her out of the fire like some kind of hero. I know he’ll make it.” 

Taenn didn’t know what his wife had seen in that wrecked plaza, and he couldn’t understand her faith, but there was nothing that he could say to convince her otherwise. He wouldn’t speak a word of it even if there was. 

The boy had saved his little girl, after all; he more than deserved to make it through.

The following day unwound like an anxious, dark ball of unstable plasma. Taenn only dared to venture between apartments in their complex, checking in on neighbors and asking after medical supplies. He managed to scrounge up a couple more old bacta patches. They were passed their expiration date and would not work as well as they should, but the boy needed all the help he could get.

The unpleasant smell of smoldering plastoid was suffused into every inch of the complex, but grew worse as he neared the living quarters of the elderly Mr. Strust. A hot pool of dread yawned open in his stomach when he came upon Strust’s door, jammed halfway open and leaking the flickering light of the apartment’s shattered light-tubing into the hall.

The old man’s body lay only a few meters further in, twisted into unnatural contortions and severed below the hips. Torn up couch cushions, collapsed durasteel, and shattered glass surrounded the hulking mass of a metallic sphere bearing the painted-on crest of Republic Sienar Systems. 

Taenn knew nothing and less about weaponry, but after three years of holonet broadcasts from battles across the galaxy, he knew a bomb when he saw one. The old man’s apartment must have been hit in the night and the second projectile hadn't gone off. It meant nothing for old Mr. Strust, but that one malfunction may have saved the lives of half the beings in the complex.

It was a grim, gut-wrenching sort of luck, and Taenn could not bear the relief he felt. He stumbled back out into the hall and spat up what little he’d managed to eat in the last two days.

Late that night—after he put Sirna down and Thima finally collapsed from exhaustion on the couch—Taenn returned to the boy’s bedside to tend to his bandages. When he slipped through the doorway, carrying his salvaged bacta patches, he did not find an unconscious teenager on death’s doorstep: the boy was awake. 

They stared at one another for a long moment, neither entirely sure of what to say to the other. The boy’s eyes were almost shockingly blue, like the clearest skies on an ocean planet.

“Hello,” Taenn said dumbly. “You’re awake.”

The boy did not answer; he was busy taking in his heavily bandaged extremities. He grimaced and his brow set with determination, stirring for the first time in two days to haul himself up to a sitting position.

“Oh! No, no—stop that,” Taenn said as he shot forward, pressing the boy back down onto the bed by his shoulders. “If you move around too much you’re liable to tear some of the bandages, and we don’t have many left as it is.”

The boy stared up at him with wide, confused eyes. He opened his mouth to speak, but all that came out was a faint wheeze and harsh, dry coughing.

“It’s been two days, kid. Your body isn’t used to doing anything other than sleeping.” The boy settled back willingly, but none of the tension left him. “I’ll get you some water, then you can ask me whatever you want.” 

The boy searched his face for signs of deceit. His gaze was so intense that Taenn felt for a moment as if a serpent had slipped into his brain in search of lies. His shoulders relaxed a bit, and he nodded slowly, leaning back further into the pillows.

Once Taenn had returned with a glass of water and a pain-suppressant tablet and the boy had managed to swallow both down, he tried speaking again.

“Where—” he coughed sharply and took another sip from his water. “Where am I? What planet am I on?”

Of all the questions to be asked, Taenn had not expected that one. Was the boy's head injured as well? Were his memories impaired?

“Mandalore,” he said, speaking slowly for the boy’s benefit. “You’re in the four-hundredth district of the capital city of Sundari. My wife—Thima is her name—brought you here after you saved our daughter from an exploding missile.”

The boy shrank further into the bed with every word. He seemed very young just then, and Taenn was reminded starkly that he was, indeed, a child. 

“Mandalore,” he whispered to himself, then again more harshly, “ _Mandalore_.” His eyes snapped back to Taenn’s face, and now they were sharp and determined. “What is today’s date?”

“Going by the galactic calendar: it’s the seventeenth day of the fifth month.”

The boy’s jaw slackened and the blood drained from his face. He looked away from Taenn and stared up at the empty ceiling, closing his hands into tight fists—no doubt aggravating the burns along his arms. 

He breathed out a long, aggrieved sigh and said in his small, hoarse voice: “ _Fuck_.”

Taenn blinked. 

********

Luke slipped in and out of consciousness every few minutes for at least a day after he first awoke to Taenn Mylluh standing at the foot of his bed. He felt weary down to the marrow in his bones, and his many wounds flared with white-hot pain whenever he dared to move.

He wasn’t entirely certain of how he had come to occupy some other boy’s bedroom, nor where that child might be—and it was certainly a child: the walls were adorned with flimsiplast posters from holovids, a stuffed mythosaur wedged into a shelf overflowing with a thousand trinkets. Star-shaped blotches marred the white ceiling where adhesive lights had once been, the remains of early childhood.

The thick bacta-patches along his arms were stark evidence of his last clear memory: cutting his way into the smoldering cockpit of a Republic troop transport to free a struggling pilot from a fiery death. The hatch had refused to give way and Luke was forced to reach through an electrical fire to activate its release mechanism. 

The clone—already half-dead from smoke inhalation—could only slump weakly over Luke’s shoulders as he dragged him out, and he was no help at all when an entire squad of his comrades came at him, guns blazing. 

After that, everything blurred together into one confused mass of pain, fire, and death. He had no recollection of saving a little girl, but apparently he had done just that—and it was probably the only reason he was still alive. 

On the fourth or fifth occasion that he startled himself awake with his own low moaning, Luke found that he was no longer alone. Rather than the solid presence of the man, his visitor was a short, pale-faced woman. Her black, untidy hair stuck out in tufts—gleaming with grease for lack of washing. Green, frantic eyes pinned him with their bloodshot stare. It made Luke feel deeply unsettled. 

The strange woman opened her mouth, but only a faint squeak came forth before it shut with a snap of teeth. 

“Hello?” he whispered, wishing desperately for the comfort of his lightsaber. “Are you—” he broke off with a dry cough and took a moment to wet his lips. “Are you Thima? Taenn Mylluh’s wife?”

She inched closer to his bedside and reached out with trembling fingers, as if to caress his cheek as he imagined a mother might. Something in his expression seemed to stop her before she touched him, and some clarity finally entered her awestruck eyes. Her hand dropped limply to her side. She nodded slowly, and it took Luke a moment to remember that he had asked a question. 

“Well,” he said in a hoarse rasp, “is there something I—”

“You saved my daughter’s life.” She spoke so quickly and breathlessly that Luke could barely make any of it out as words.

“I—I suppose that I did, ma’am.” Luke found himself slipping into the old pleasantries that Aunt Beru had drilled into him when he was little. It was strange being praised for something he did not remember.

“You saved Sirna. You saved my daughter.” She did not seem to have heard Luke at all, and she was wholly blind to his awkward shifting. “It’s impossible. She shouldn’t be alive. She should be with Hakku. You _saved_ her.” 

A peculiar, airy laugh shot from her smiling mouth and Luke scooted as far from her as he could manage. A confused look crossed her face for a moment before some clarifying force passed over her, and she blinked.

“I don’t even know your name,” she said. Thima Mylluh still appeared dazed and tired, but the manic energy that so disturbed Luke had drained out of her. 

He shifted back into the center of the bed and contemplated what to say. There was no real reason for him to lie; he wasn’t trying to conceal his identity from anyone. In fact, his very existence was a vital piece of evidence to prove that he was right about what was to come. Of course, that didn’t really matter just then—speaking to a random, jittery Mandalorian woman.

He told the truth: “My name is Luke Skywalker.”

She mouthed his name silently and seemed satisfied by it. Without another word, she withdrew and left him alone.

Sleep eluded him after that, even though his fatigue weighed on him like a heap of Tusken mud blocks. After drifting in and out of consciousness for three whole days, his body simply couldn’t take anymore. Luke’s wounds, which had finally begun to assert themselves at full strength, forced him to remain prone upon the bed—unable to find rest and incapable of doing anything else.

There was only one thing for Luke to do, and he wasn’t sure he actually knew how. Jedi Knights like Old Ben were well versed in emergency battlefield Force healing, but most could only really stop a blaster-bolt wound from bleeding. Luke’s hundreds of tiny shrapnel gouges and rigid, black tinged burns were far too serious for those basic techniques. 

Four crucial days remained before a millennium of cloak-and-dagger plotting would come to an end and the Sith would have their revenge. Luke could not face the Dark Lord of the Sith as he was. Only the Force itself could aid him now, and Luke’s faith had to be unwavering.

The wise voice of a twisted and aged Jedi Master spoke from the depths of his memory, the only time Luke had ever met a Jedi other than his own teacher: “ _Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter_ . _You must feel the Force around you—everywhere_.”

Just as he felt that day on swamp choked Dagobah, the Force flowed through his being like a glittering waterfall of pure light—unmarred by the taint of the Sith and the blood of billions spilled across the galaxy. It gathered him up, spreading its peace and soothing power from the ends of his greasy blonde hair to his shivering toes. 

Luke heard the rolling murmurs of the uncountable trillions who had joined with the wellspring of the Cosmic Force before him. Echoes of his confused and jumbled vision, more than half a fever dream, slipped through his veins and he felt the warm weight of his grandmother’s hands—the glimmering adoration in the Togruta girl’s wide, blue eyes. 

********

To weary Taenn Mylluh, nothing had changed when he came to tend to Luke’s injuries. The boy did not stir when he began to unwind the cloth bandages along his lacerated legs, and he made no sound at all when Taenn pulled the bacta patches away from the wretched burns that crisscrossed his arms.

It was not until all the bindings were stripped away and the boy was once again bare upon the bed that the man noticed what had happened: the jagged cuts and pockmarked gouges that had still seeped blood only a day ago were covered over by already fading scars; his terribly scorched flesh, burnt away nearly to the bone in places, now appeared only as a glossy reddening of otherwise normal skin. 

He was not entirely healed and would most likely bear those scars for the rest of his life without cosmetic adjustments—but it was as if months of recovery had been truncated to the few hours between when Taenn had last tended to him and now.

Taenn’s calloused hands trembled, and he stepped back from the bed with quick feet. It shouldn’t have been possible. Nothing about the boy— _Luke Skywalker_ —should have been possible. He was thoroughly miraculous, and it left Taenn deeply unsettled.

“Thima,” he whispered at first, though he knew that his wife had retired for the night on a roll of blankets beside Sirna’s bed. He said it louder, nearly yelling: “Thima! He’s—it’s—I—”. Taenn whipped around and grasped the cool metal of the door frame, peering out into the hallway. 

“Please stop shouting, Mr. Mylluh,” a calm, young voice spoke from just behind where Taenn stood. The strangled quality, as if a great ball of phlegm had lodged itself in the boy’s throat, was gone.

He turned around very slowly, leaning hard on the door frame as his whole being vibrated with disbelief. The boy stood only a meter away, no hint of his days long brush with death to be seen, but for how his rowdy blonde hair was matted and unkempt. 

Now on his own two feet, Taenn could ascertain a better impression of him: he was of average height, if a tad on the shorter side; he carried himself with a simple confidence and subtle strength that seemed strange for a boy no older than Taenn’s own son. He was so absorbed in his examination that he did not realize for a moment that the boy was still speaking.

“I know you must be shocked and confused—I assure you that I am as well—and I know that you’ll want to ask me a thousand different questions, but I need something before we can get to all of that.” 

“And what would that be?” Taenn heard himself say, though he could not explain where the will to speak had come from.

“Food,” the boy said simply.

Taenn was shocked back to full awareness. He wasn’t sure what he had expected, but he knew it wasn’t something so... _normal_. Taenn settled for a nod.

That was all the go ahead the boy seemed to need, slipping passed him through the doorway and calling over his shoulder: “You wouldn’t happen to have any Naboo pears, would you? They’ve always been my favorite.”

“Hey, kid,” he piped up just before Luke rounded the corner into the kitchenette. “You want to put something on first?”

The boy stopped and looked down at himself, a light pink flush spreading up his neck as he swiveled on his heels and made his way back to where Taenn remained. Luke covered himself—unsuccessfully, but Taenn wouldn’t comment on that—with both of his hands.

All he said, while staring resolutely at the wall beyond Taenn’s head, was: “Yes please.”

Once they had found him something to wear—one of Taenn’s old, loose fitting synthetic shirts and a pair of Torr’s many pocketed pants—he set a bowl of leftover tiingilar in front of the boy. Despite being notorious across the galaxy for its overwhelming spice, the soup didn’t affect the boy in the slightest. 

Yet another miracle.

He waited for Luke to finish spooning the last clump of dark-orange soup into his mouth before asking in a breathless rush: “Who are you?”

Luke glanced up at him in amused confusion, setting his spoon down and pushing the empty bowl away. “I’m Luke Skywalker,” he said in a slow voice, as if speaking to a young child. 

“Yes, I know,” Taenn spoke with a frustrated edge. “What I mean is: how did you do that? Who are you that you could heal yourself like that?”

Luke folded his tanned hands in his lap and leaned back on his stool. He regarded Taenn warily and said: “I didn’t do anything. Well, not much anyway.” Taenn’s disbelief must have shown on his face. “I put my trust in the Force and was generously rewarded for my faith.” 

A creeping suspicion, one that had burrowed itself into his brain when Thima first told him what happened, sprang to the forefront of Taenn’s mind. “The Force?” he said quietly. “Like the Jedi’s Force?”

Luke’s amusement returned with a vengeance, the corner of his mouth drawing up slightly. “The Jedi Order does not own the Force, Taenn Mylluh. It is an energy field that surrounds all living things—it binds the galaxy together. All of our fates are wrapped up in it, even yours.”

Taenn didn’t know a single thing about destiny and supernatural powers, but he was suddenly struck by a deep-seated distaste for the very concept of the Force. “So, it just decided to help you out because you believed in it hard enough? Anyone could decide to accept that it was real, and they could be healed? From what I’ve seen, it doesn’t seem like the Force cares about most of us.”

The boy’s face fell and his amusement quickly fled. “I don’t think it’s that simple.”

Taenn immediately felt like a fool and said softly: “I’m sorry, Luke. I shouldn’t have lashed out like that. It’s just, well, I can’t wrap my head around all of this. You saved Sirna, and I’m grateful for that, truly and completely. But there’s no understanding anything that I’ve seen happen around you. And the effect you’ve had on Thima…” he trailed off and fell silent.

“She seemed, er, _excited_ to see me awake,” Luke said dumbly. The boy cringed a moment later at the implication in his tone, but Taenn smiled softly.

“My wife is an extraordinarily strong-willed person, but even she has her limits. She’s been less and less in touch with reality this past year since—well, the war has taken its toll.” Taenn buried his emotions as he spoke, slipping passed wounds that were still raw and painful. “But when you saved Sirna...I don’t know—it was like some light had finally come back on in her head. You’ve given her hope.”

“Thima mentioned a boy when she came to me—Hakku,” Luke said gently, his bright-blue eyes soft with compassion. “It’s his room you put me up in, isn’t it?”

Taenn breathed out a deep, weary sigh, pressing his eyes closed and rubbing at his brow. “Yes,” he said in a voice that was barely there at all. “He was thirteen when he died. Thima hasn’t been the same since it happened. But some of her looks like it's coming back now, thanks to you. I just hope it lasts.”

There was a strained worry to his final words that the boy pounced on immediately. He said: “What do you mean?”

Taenn did not want to bare any more of his sordid emotional state to the boy, but there was a firmness to the question that forced him to answer. “Our eldest—Torr—he’s a student at the Royal Academy on the other side of Sundari. He hasn’t responded to any of our messages and the Academy is much closer to where the fighting seems to be than we are. The only way I could get Thima to sleep was by plying her with alcohol.”

Luke absorbed it all quietly and with an air of intensely contemplative, almost meditative focus. There was something in the set of his brow that made it seem to Taenn as if he was conversing mutely with a being that Taenn could not perceive—it sharpened his suspicion.

Luke shocked Taenn when he spoke again: “May I see her? Your daughter, Sirna, I mean. I would like to see if it might jog my memory.”

Taenn hadn’t been expecting that at all, and he could only nod silently. It was wholly clear to him that there was something else on the boy’s mind beside reviving hidden memories. All the same, Taenn disposed of the boy’s bowl and guided him down the dimly lit corridor to Sirna’s room.

The door hung slightly ajar and the soft light of his daughter’s night lamp leaked into the hall. Taenn looked back to Luke and pressed his finger gently to his lips, pushing the door open slowly. 

Inside, the room was just as he had left it a few hours previous: Sirna’s many little baubles were stored away in their proper places; her blanket was drawn up to her little chin, rising and falling with each breath. Below the girl’s small bed, Thima sprawled on a roll of folded blankets. For the first time in days, she looked fully at peace.

Luke shuffled silently into the room and stood beside him, focused intently on the little girl in the bed. For many long minutes, he looked between Sirna and the woman curled on the floor with an expressionless face. He examined the two with such intensity that it made Taenn feel like he was somehow intruding by watching the boy. Finally, he turned on his heel and slipped out through the doorway, leaving Taenn to follow in his wake.

Once he had closed the door gently— taking care not to wake the sleepers— Taenn turned to find Luke standing still as a statue in the middle of the hall, his eyes shut tight. The boy’s breathing was even and his hands were folded tightly behind his back, his fingers threading together. It appeared to be the same as what he did at the table before. As with most things concerning Luke Skywalker, observing his meditative trance left Taenn feeling distinctly uncomfortable.

He had truly begun to worry that something was wrong, perhaps a sudden flare up in the boy’s miraculously healed injuries, when Luke’s shoulders slumped and he released a long, thin breath. When the boy faced him his eyes were hard and determined and his voice was filled with irresistible certainty. 

“I will help you find your son, Taenn Mylluh.”

“Excuse me?” he said, baffled. He had never spoken a word of such a thing to Luke. “You don’t have to—and we couldn’t even make our way across the city without getting shot to ribbons or vaporized by proton bombs. I couldn’t ask you to do that; I _will not_ ask you to do that.”

“You don’t need to—the Force already has. I have a task to fulfill of the utmost urgency, and it seems your son is on my path towards doing so.” The gravitas and near mystical authority bled away when he smiled gently. “Besides, family is significant to my people.”

Taenn had no clue what to say to that, and told Luke as much. The boy’s smile grew wider and his eyes sparkled.

“We have to move quickly, there’s little time left as it is.” A slightly sheepish expression overtook the boy’s face, and he peered over Taenn’s shoulder to the closed door beyond. “Out of curiosity, did your wife bring anything else home with her? Perhaps a metal cylinder with a few switches and buttons?”

Taenn knew immediately what he was asking after, and he felt all of his suspicions suddenly align in perfect harmony, but he said nothing of it. Luke had saved his daughter and was now volunteering to do the same for Torr—he was allowed to keep his secrets.


End file.
